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Practical Advice for Digital MarketersSat, 27 Dec 2014 01:42:09 +0000en-UShourly1https://wordpress.org/?v=4.9.74569572http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.0/http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.0/http://creativecommons.org/images/public/somerights20.gifSome Rights ReservedPpc-advicecomhttps://feedburner.google.comThe Pros and Cons of Big Data Democratizationhttp://feedproxy.google.com/~r/Ppc-advicecom/~3/UBKhQ7PbdQY/
http://www.ppc-advice.com/2014/01/11/the-pros-and-cons-of-big-data-democratization/#commentsSat, 11 Jan 2014 15:37:38 +0000http://www.ppc-advice.com/?p=903We live in very complex times. As much as we talk about integrated insights, it only seems to be getting worse. If I sound a little bleak it’s because this statement has been shared ad nauseam: digital marketers are literally drowning in data. Data sources range from anecdotal and trivial to scientifically precise, and span … Continue reading The Pros and Cons of Big Data Democratization

]]>We live in very complex times. As much as we talk about integrated insights, it only seems to be getting worse.

If I sound a little bleak it’s because this statement has been shared ad nauseam: digital marketers are literally drowning in data.

Data sources range from anecdotal and trivial to scientifically precise, and span numerous systems both on premise, in the cloud, and property of third-party data providers. Using several approaches to arrive at a single truth (to within a reasonable variance, I might add) is extremely difficult.

Many share this conservative view on data democratization, believing that only data scientists and digital analysts should embark on these journeys into meaningful and rigorous analysis, while others argue that data should be liberated, free for all to use.

Debates on this subject usually happen in the upper echelons of an organization. The classic arguments surround data ownership and often pit marketers against technology, amongst other silos.

While there is plenty of material that analyzes the data ownership debate, data democratization involves the access, usage, and (more importantly) the decisions influenced by multiple groups conducting research and making recommendations to the organization. And while some points may only resonate with enterprise-level organizations, digital marketers and analysts alike working at small and medium-sized businesses would be prudent to recognize the challenges and maturity milestones introduced with scale.

Challenges surrounding data democratization abound, and every organization’s data practice must decide policies and responsibilities in order to remain impartial, so here are some arguments to keep in mind when deciding in which zone of the political spectrum of data democratization you fall.

Characteristics of Conservative data democratization:

Data should be owned and analyzed by specific individuals or groups within their organization, forming a center of excellence.

Strict governance over the collection, interpretation, and dissemination of information must be followed.

Accountability resides within the data science group.

Time is better spent studying data within the group than training those outside the group.

Data should be owned by the organization and can be analyzed by anyone.

Loose governance over the collection, interpretation, and dissemination of information.

Accountability resides with the data user (i.e., the person or group reporting the data).

Time is better spent training consumers across the organization to use the data themselves.

Pros to being Liberal:

Distribution of information across working teams encourages entrepreneurial spirit, often benefitting smaller, more agile, or less regulated organizations.

Usually many sources of data available at a user’s disposal due to looser controls over data collection.

Data-savvy stakeholders tend to incorporate data analysis into their official mandate, making them less dependent on a centralized analysis team.

If a dedicated analyst group exists, opportunities arise where external stakeholders or users of the data can be considered for positions within the insights team and vice versa.

Lower value insights work can be pushed to self-serve capabilities rather than being deprioritized.

Consequences of being Liberal:

Multiple data sources and data consuming groups lead to multiple versions of the truth, increasing churn and generally leading to less confidence in recommendations.

If a dedicated analyst group exists, they may experience frustration with misinterpreted data across the organization.

Less governance over the collection and usage of data may go violate privacy and regulatory controls.

User experience may be negatively impacted with too many data collection methodologies.

Redundant job functions across multiple groups can be more costly to an organization than a centralized insights team.

While it’s easy to preach one democratic approach over the other, the reality is that extremely conservative or liberal views rarely fit in the context of data democratization. Business leaders need to carefully weigh the pros and cons of data democratization to determine which approach benefits their organization the most.

Where do you and your organization land in the spectrum? Feel free to comment below!

]]>http://www.ppc-advice.com/2014/01/11/the-pros-and-cons-of-big-data-democratization/feed/4903http://www.ppc-advice.com/2014/01/11/the-pros-and-cons-of-big-data-democratization/9 Ways to Prepare for a Future Without Cookie Trackinghttp://feedproxy.google.com/~r/Ppc-advicecom/~3/AnvvLI3Sp90/
http://www.ppc-advice.com/2013/10/23/9-ways-to-prepare-for-a-future-without-cookie-tracking/#respondWed, 23 Oct 2013 14:35:04 +0000http://www.ppc-advice.com/?p=901It was over a year ago that I first wrote about do not track legislation, and luckily for most organizations the browser-provided imperative is loosely supported or regulated today, with very few sites adhering to interpretation and compliance of the preference. For the most part, do not track legislation is often misunderstood by the general public, … Continue reading 9 Ways to Prepare for a Future Without Cookie Tracking

]]>It was over a year ago that I first wrote about do not track legislation, and luckily for most organizations the browser-provided imperative is loosely supported or regulated today, with very few sites adhering to interpretation and compliance of the preference.

For the most part, do not track legislation is often misunderstood by the general public, and even our regulators in its definition, usage, and most importantly the privacy implications and confidence it is meant to instill.

From a digital practitioner standpoint “do not track” is the least of my worries but upcoming news about Microsoft and Google pursuing cookie-less tracking capabilities indicates to me that education on how digital information is collected and shared will become even more important in the near future.

Rather than panicking, there is a lot we can do today to enact guiding principles that will likely ease a transition into tighter privacy controls in the future.

Education

One of the biggest problems facing digital marketing and analytics practitioners will be education. The industry has evolved so quickly that much of the technology that we rely on every day is likely taken for granted.

Personalization is one such area that relies on tracking, profiling, and delivering a lot of information about visitor preferences and behavior, which many of us likely take for granted.

One might argue that personalization is a byproduct of contextual advertising, and without underlying tracking technologies, wouldn’t be possible to deliver.

Teasing apart a key delivery mechanism such as a session or persistent cookie will be very challenging, but explaining the importance of cookies and their usage to visitors and customers even more so.

What can you do to prepare?

1. Ensure your privacy policy is up to date and fully transparent.

2. Explain what tracking technologies are used (savvy users will know how to check for this themselves anyways).

3. What cookies are employed and for what reason.

Usage

It’s probably safe to say that aside from a few specific highly-regulated industries and regions, most digital marketing practitioners don’t spent too much time or due diligence in reviewing data usage models with third-party vendors and their technology.

Regulators focus both on collection and usage of data in these scenarios, particularly when third parties are involved because in many cases, these partners assume ownership of the data collected on your digital properties. This is the same reason why many browsers automatically block third-party cookies, to ensure data collection services and the usage of visitor information are being entrusted to the right recipients.

Consent

In my opinion, this is where most of the opportunity is for much of North America. Very few companies actually gather consent in a clear and concise manner.

To be brutally honest, most of us think that relying on a single line radio box at the bottom of a registration page, with a link to a hundred page disclosure is acceptable. From a legal standpoint, it probably will cover you from any litigation, but from a customer experience perspective, hundreds of pages of disclosure tend to make the average Joe either uninterested or a little paranoid.

What can you do to prepare?

7. Humanize your terms and conditions. Less legalese and more transparency.

9. Introduce ways visitors and customers can opt-into and out of technology that enables digital marketing and personalization quickly and easily.

Conclusion

Think about the steps you can take today to instill a greater confidence in your digital business and marketing efforts today. Sometimes little things go a long way to earn the respect and trust of visitors and customers, making the impact of future technology tracking capabilities or regulatory guidelines easier to transition into.

Have you done anything to prepare your website and visitors for the future of tracking and digital marketing personalization?

]]>http://www.ppc-advice.com/2013/10/23/9-ways-to-prepare-for-a-future-without-cookie-tracking/feed/0901http://www.ppc-advice.com/2013/10/23/9-ways-to-prepare-for-a-future-without-cookie-tracking/How to Introduce a Politics-Free Prioritization Model for Analytics Reportinghttp://feedproxy.google.com/~r/Ppc-advicecom/~3/DgAeScEibQU/
http://www.ppc-advice.com/2013/07/17/how-to-introduce-a-politics-free-prioritization-model-for-analytics-reporting/#respondWed, 17 Jul 2013 13:32:58 +0000http://www.ppc-advice.com/?p=898Building a center of excellence analytics practice, whether it’s web analytics or data analytics, is bound to get you a lot of attention. The self-perpetuating cycle of asking business questions, diving deep into analytics data, providing actionable insights, and testing data-driven recommendations often scales by orders of magnitude quicker than the human resources and tools … Continue reading How to Introduce a Politics-Free Prioritization Model for Analytics Reporting

]]>Building a center of excellence analytics practice, whether it’s web analytics or data analytics, is bound to get you a lot of attention. The self-perpetuating cycle of asking business questions, diving deep into analytics data, providing actionable insights, and testing data-driven recommendations often scales by orders of magnitude quicker than the human resources and tools often allow.

Eventually, every practice runs into the problem of having to prioritize competing stakeholder demands, which is a great problem to have, but without the proper prioritization model in place, many shops can quickly fall victim to politics and worse yet, analysis paralysis.

Establishing a prioritization model is fairly simple, and doesn’t have to be overly complicated or involve any specialized tools of any kind. An Excel spreadsheet on a shared drive can do wonders, but here are some guidelines you can think about when starting your own prioritization model.

Establish Line of Sight

You can start establishing a prioritization model by putting the framework in place to track requests being submitted to the team and the lifecycle of insights through to completion. Think of this as your resource management cheat sheet. You only have so many resources, and you only have so much time, but sometimes you can cascade work from one resource to another, somewhat like a production line.

Allocate Business Value to Each Request

Weighing competing priorities by some kind of scoring criteria can be done many ways, but many practices seek some sense of monetary value for each request. Most leaders in the industry will look for a strategic value assessment, which is a KPI involving equal parts revenue generation potential, estimated cost savings, and increased customer satisfaction.

In many cases, if your stakeholders are asking relevant business questions, they’re often looking to prove a business case with some inkling of strategic value, so you can often ask them for a conservative estimate that can be validated for reasonability.

Seek Out Executive Sponsorship

The same people who sign your paycheck and grant your practice additional budget and resources will want to know that you’ve been supporting their own goals and the goals of their C-suite peers.

As alluded to above, reasonability checks against the strategic value of each request should ideally come from someone in a leadership role. This also tends to reduce the potential for name-dropping and internal politics.

Maintain Strategic Alignment

Depending on where your practice lives within an organization, allocation of resources (and therefore work effort) should be determined and refocused throughout the year.

For instance, if the strategic alignment of the insights team is driving sales rather than reducing customer churn, there should be less overall prioritization granted to requests that are related to operational issues and customer experience. That doesn’t mean issues of a severe nature can be ignored, but if at the end of the year the insights practice delivered 80 percent of their recommendations for customer retention questions, they may be misaligned and under-delivering with respect to their sales focus.

Keep in mind that resourcing and budget may come from other groups within the organization.

Determine Optimum Levels of Team Efficiency

As we all know, scale can easily be accomplished by driving up volume and driving down quality, but that approach is rarely sustainable, especially in a consultative business such as analytics and insights.

In order to effectively drive long-term value for the organization, and avoid potential burn-out of your team, you’ll want to determine what the right mix of volume and quality might be, so that you can prove your case for additional resources, or allow your executive sponsors to decide prioritization for their business objectives based on current resourcing allocation.

On the flipside, you can also use efficiency indicators to assess leaders and laggards on your team and either balance the workload or look for coaching opportunities.

Conclusion

An effective prioritization model can do wonders in helping you scale your insights practice, and avoid a lot of internal politics associated with competing business stakeholders and limited resources.

By no means are the aforementioned prerequisites for an effective analytics center of excellence, but at the speed at which the big-data industry is growing are provided as guidelines to help many insights leaders scale effectively in an ever-increasing data-driven digital marketing environment.

]]>One of the biggest challenges a marketer faces when trying to accurately attribute campaign success to different mediums is consistent use of campaign parameters to further segment and demystify the “Direct” or “Bookmarked” traffic sources in analytics software.

Many marketers don’t immediately appreciate the huge impact of improperly attributed campaign tracking. For instance, direct or bookmarked traffic is very expensive and labor intensive, so you’ll want to ensure these high-priced referrals to your site are adequately tracked to calculate the true ROI of a campaign.

Some examples include television and billboard referrals for URLs that are used across multiple markets, which are often redirected with vanity URLs to actual landing pages. These wreak havoc on campaign attribution and traffic source reports if not properly tracked.

A second consideration when doing any kind of in-depth campaign analysis is the granularity of the traffic sources or tactical approaches used in any given campaign.

For example, you may have social efforts that span numerous sites, all utilizing a single bit.ly URL with a single campaign tracking code, which is a great first step, but any further analysis on original site and messaging is rendered impossible.

Having reviewed some of the pitfalls of campaign attribution, here are some basic guidelines you can follow to demystify direct and/or bookmarked traffic:

Regardless of how amazing your analytics software can resolve a referrer, include it in your campaign parameter anyways.

Include a campaign name and other meta-data in your tracking code. There are minor differences between how analytics vendors handle this, but include as much as possible to ensure all information is available at the time of analysis.

If you follow the above guidelines, you won’t only be able to demystify your direct or bookmarked traffic, but you’ll also build a strong foundation of data integrity, so that your calculations of ROI are as accurate as possible with client-side code.

]]>http://www.ppc-advice.com/2013/06/05/demystifying-directbookmarked-traffic-in-analytics-reports/feed/0895http://www.ppc-advice.com/2013/06/05/demystifying-directbookmarked-traffic-in-analytics-reports/Top 5 reasons against implementing a tag management system and how to squash themhttp://feedproxy.google.com/~r/Ppc-advicecom/~3/3apgFuG4txo/
http://www.ppc-advice.com/2013/05/24/top-5-reasons-against-implementing-a-tag-management-system-and-how-to-squash-them/#respondFri, 24 May 2013 14:27:18 +0000http://www.ppc-advice.com/?p=893My last article provided the top five arguments for implementing a tag management solution. By now you might even be sold on implementing one in the near future, but inevitably every organization has to examine many of the same use cases and value assessments. Let’s face it, the competition is stiff, and vendors are at each … Continue reading Top 5 reasons against implementing a tag management system and how to squash them

]]>My last article provided the top five arguments for implementing a tag management solution. By now you might even be sold on implementing one in the near future, but inevitably every organization has to examine many of the same use cases and value assessments.

Let’s face it, the competition is stiff, and vendors are at each other’s throats to get your business, but the toughest-fought battle will be with your own organization.

Here are some of the biggest objections that you’re likely to face and how to squash all fears.

1. Why pay for a tag management solution when [insert company name] does it for free?

Many companies offer tag management for free, including Google and most of the bigger analytics software companies such as Adobe, Webtrends, etc.

Your first consideration should always be information security and service-level agreements. Free or BETA tag management solutions are products that could have a negative effect on data integrity, user experience, and long-term value. As always, paid solutions will provide that neck to choke should you have any issues whatsoever.

2. Tag management software essentially injects code into our website, how can we trust that our website will be safe from malicious intent?

There are many ways a hacker can take advantage of vulnerabilities in your website, many of which don’t involve the complexities of attempting to access your code base from a third-party solution.

If you think about it, any externally-referenced code is susceptible to security vulnerabilities including some analytics software solutions themselves.

In many cases, tag management can assist in debugging security vulnerabilities and malicious behavior, and be used to manage any compromised externally-hosted code. In this case, much like optimization software solutions, the benefits outweigh the risks.

3. How can I trust business people with front-end code changes?

You can’t fully trust that your business people won’t mess up front-end code changes. However, tag management offers full workflow for testing changes on live sites to ensure compatibility.

In addition, most vendors offer an easy to use interface that decouples the code and the business reporting requirements, making the addition of tags as easy as dragging and dropping object-oriented rules, making it literally klutz-proof (notice I didn’t say idiot-proof).

Heck no, you should never allow any new software to bypass your governance.

Most tag management solutions allow you to configure workflows and user roles to fully administer and end-to-end change management process. That means you can allow web analysts to request a change, implementation analysts to create tags, QA to test the tags, and publishers to push the tags to production.

5. How can we justify the total cost of ownership when we already pay for an analytics solution as well?

There are several benefits of implementing a tag management solution, but the strongest argument that I have found is speed to market. When executives get bitten by the data bug, they love to ask a lot of tough questions that usually can’t be answered with out of the box reporting.

As the organizational maturity increases and data-drive decisions become more prevalent, questions become tougher and tougher to answer without the help of expensive technology or increased labor resources.

Free up your analytics team from finding workarounds in data collection and let them do what they love, analysis, and the tools will pay for themselves!

Have you been considering the use of a tag management solution for your business? Have you successfully implemented a TMS in the past? Let us know in the comments section below.

]]>http://www.ppc-advice.com/2013/05/24/top-5-reasons-against-implementing-a-tag-management-system-and-how-to-squash-them/feed/0893http://www.ppc-advice.com/2013/05/24/top-5-reasons-against-implementing-a-tag-management-system-and-how-to-squash-them/Top 5 reasons to implement a tag management solutionhttp://feedproxy.google.com/~r/Ppc-advicecom/~3/HPjBkFOBszU/
http://www.ppc-advice.com/2013/03/14/top-5-reasons-to-implement-a-tag-management-solution/#respondThu, 14 Mar 2013 14:24:31 +0000http://www.ppc-advice.com/?p=891As I wrote in my web analytics 2012 year in review, tag management is primed for a blowout year in 2013. Tag management systems have matured and now offer a wealth of new tracking capabilities beyond basic functionality of simply centralizing your tags. If you’re contemplating the switch, you need to consider these five arguments … Continue reading Top 5 reasons to implement a tag management solution

]]>As I wrote in my web analytics 2012 year in review, tag management is primed for a blowout year in 2013.

Tag management systems have matured and now offer a wealth of new tracking capabilities beyond basic functionality of simply centralizing your tags.

If you’re contemplating the switch, you need to consider these five arguments for implementing a tag management solution (TMS).

1. Freedom to Change Tags as Required by Business Questions

Many of us want the freedom to add, modify, or remove tags whenever we come across a business question we can’t answer with our current analytics software and/or implementation. Changing tags is a necessity of a TMS, but it’s also extremely dangerous and should often be intelligently weighed against the full breadth of capabilities your software currently offers.

In addition, many vendors will offer the ability to go beyond traditional tracking capabilities, with cool JSON or jQuery features such as broken link detection, mobile screen orientation and more. Many also offer sophisticated graphic user interfaces to make otherwise development-heavy changes quick and easy for business users and marketers.

2. Establish Governance of Tagging Across Your Websites

Many businesses incorrectly assume that using a TMS automatically equates to handing analysts the keys to their IT infrastructure with the freedom to make changes outside of a proper workflow or governance model, but that couldn’t be further from the truth.

Implementing a TMS shouldn’t replace any online publishing workflow or quality assurance rigor, and many vendors include framework to support workflow and change management approvals for this specific reason.

3. Reduce Maintenance Costs

Regardless of whether you’re running a paid or free analytics solution, a TMS will effectively enable you to lower operating costs across the board. At the very least, you’ll reduce IT overhead required to make development changes to support analytics reporting capabilities, which is a shared pain point amongst paid and free analytics software vendors alike.

With paid analytics solutions that are often billed on a CPM basis, you can selectively enable or disable primary page-load tags or even asynchronous (onClick) tags at your convenience, which is extremely effective for campaign or seasonal reporting requirements. In addition, a TMS allows for extreme JavaScript file size optimization, so depending on your server load, halving your JS file could effectively reduce page load time and bandwidth costs over time.

4. Code Portability & Becoming Vendor Agnostic

As the analytics industry matures, many of us are faced with sharing information between different systems, which can be a huge challenge with respect to back-end integrations. Tag management effectively bridges the gap between several front-end tagging methodologies that can be used to leverage existing development work and easily port information from one script or beacon to another.

In addition, since tagging rules within a TMS are often defined in a GUI with a set of business rules and even regular expressions, moving from one analytics solution to another becomes extremely easy. After nearly 10 years in this space, I’ve seen vendors and solutions come and go, so I know this may not be a huge deal to many of you, but this kind of portability is priceless when faced with a difficult migration path for hundreds of complex applications.

As many in the financial services industry would agree, coming up with a one-size-fits-all privacy and/or regulatory mechanism can be extremely difficult, especially when managing in upwards of half a dozen secure systems. Privacy commissions across the globe are diverging at an alarming rate, which only complicates matters.

Thankfully, many TMS vendors have business rules and technology in place to address the needs of data-driven marketers. Compliance has a new friend.

Summary

Next month we’ll discuss the top five reasons against implementing a tag management solution and how to squash them.

Have you been considering the use of a tag management solution for your business? Have you successfully implemented a TMS in the past? Let us know in the comments section below.

]]>http://www.ppc-advice.com/2013/03/14/top-5-reasons-to-implement-a-tag-management-solution/feed/0891http://www.ppc-advice.com/2013/03/14/top-5-reasons-to-implement-a-tag-management-solution/How to define a web analytics processhttp://feedproxy.google.com/~r/Ppc-advicecom/~3/mbCHVXEcZtY/
http://www.ppc-advice.com/2013/01/16/how-to-define-a-web-analytics-process/#respondWed, 16 Jan 2013 15:15:27 +0000http://www.ppc-advice.com/?p=888Customization of data collection code is of paramount importance to web analysts because it constitutes the fundamental building blocks required for advanced visitor segmentation above and beyond what software provides out of the box. Unfortunately, customization doesn’t come free. There is an opportunity cost of developer or publisher time and sometimes third-party vendor involvement is … Continue reading How to define a web analytics process

]]>Customization of data collection code is of paramount importance to web analysts because it constitutes the fundamental building blocks required for advanced visitor segmentation above and beyond what software provides out of the box.

Unfortunately, customization doesn’t come free.

There is an opportunity cost of developer or publisher time and sometimes third-party vendor involvement is required. Due to this tradeoff, businesses and web analysts are often faced to make tough compromises when faced with the task of implementing web analytics code, or enhancing it to support better insights.

Here are some tips to help you introduce processes to get your delicious analytics pie and eat it too!

1. Assemble a List of Reporting Requirements From Your Business Partners

Engage your businesses’ stakeholders early in the process to define what reporting will look like, and go one step beyond to establish visitor “skeletons” for future segmentation rules.

2. Develop a Web Analytics Roadmap

Define the building blocks of your implementation that will support gradual improvement of reporting insights over time. By prioritizing deliverables against reporting requirements, you can defend the need for must-have analytics code and compromise “nice to have” functionality.

3. Get to Know Your Web Development Team and Project Managers

Bundling code changes with maintenance releases or new projects is a sure-fire way to reduce the overall cost of introducing or modifying web analytics code. Work with your CTO to develop an engagement model to keep your insights practice informed of upcoming projects, especially for high-visibility capabilities that will likely benefit from customized reporting.

4. Empower Your Quality Assurance Teams

Offer training on how to debut web analytics implementation and identify issues. I’m always amazed by how detail-oriented quality assurance analysts can be when given adequate instruction, not just for analytics debugging but even for maintaining SEO integrity. (Optional)

5. Don’t Trust, Verify Immediately

After code goes live, make sure your data is flowing as expected, and regression-test your pre-existing reports. Nothing’s worse than losing a year’s worth of reporting history to a one-page enhancement.

6. Share Your Success

Include the pride of your new reporting enhancements with everyone involved including your web development team, project management office, quality assurance team, and business partners. Sharing your success should increase the odds you’ll get support in the future as well as elevate the importance of the process to everyone else in the organization.

7. Act on Insights and Plan Ahead for Future Optimizations and Reporting Enhancements

Once new code goes live the entire team has a rush of creative thought that can provide invaluable insight to your reporting capabilities. Harness that energy to make the data shine and come up with recommendations and test criteria to drive business value.

8. Embed This Process in Your Business by Seeking Executive Sign-off

Seek out one or two executives that can be your long-term sponsor in building and maintaining your insights process.

Having challenges improving your insights due to poor process? Let us know what your biggest challenges are below!

]]>http://www.ppc-advice.com/2013/01/16/how-to-define-a-web-analytics-process/feed/0888http://www.ppc-advice.com/2013/01/16/how-to-define-a-web-analytics-process/Top Conversion Optimization Tips to Deploy Before the Holiday Rushhttp://feedproxy.google.com/~r/Ppc-advicecom/~3/d59-UcRApOw/
http://www.ppc-advice.com/2012/11/15/top-conversion-optimization-tips-to-deploy-before-the-holiday-rush/#respondFri, 16 Nov 2012 00:35:51 +0000http://www.ppc-advice.com/?p=882That joyous time of year is upon us again, that magical time that kicks off holiday shopping right after Thanksgiving with Black Friday and Cyber Monday. If you haven’t already started, right now would be the perfect time to deploy some last-minute conversion optimizing changes to your website to take full advantage of what will … Continue reading Top Conversion Optimization Tips to Deploy Before the Holiday Rush

]]>That joyous time of year is upon us again, that magical time that kicks off holiday shopping right after Thanksgiving with Black Friday and Cyber Monday.

If you haven’t already started, right now would be the perfect time to deploy some last-minute conversion optimizing changes to your website to take full advantage of what will undoubtedly be a busy holiday season.

This is right out of a page from mobile operating systems that temporarily show the most recent character you typed in password fields. The theory here is simple, less people that are frustrated entering their password upwards of two or more times are likely going to abandon your site completely.

2. Be Cross-Border & Cross-Country Friendly

Sometimes the best niche stores are local to the east or west coast, and do a great job of converting with local customers, but a really terrible job of selling out of state. Don’t make that mistake; make sure your site is converting customers across the country and even across the border.

Visitors are ready to buy, credit card in hand, so reduce any hesitation they might have in making the wrong decision in the heat of the moment.

4. Enable “Check Out as a Guest” to Your Shopping Cart

Sometimes holiday shoppers are promiscuous, and only want you for a one-night stand, I say let them! A quick sale is better than no sale at all, and if you woo your one-time customers enough, they’ll be back for more.

5. Remind Shoppers of Shipping Deadlines

Nothing says “buy it now” better than a looming shipping deadline incentivized with a coincidental sale or promotion. Is your shipping deadline the second week of December? Why not incentivize your sales by introducing a promotion that ends at the same time, especially for no cost shipping options.

6. Ramp-up Customer Advice Services Such as Live Chat & Social Media Efforts

Many retailers often miss great opportunities to increase assisted website conversions with extra personnel manning live chat and social media channels during the holidays. Remember that these channels are just as important as your sales center or phone lines and have to be scaled up accordingly.

Summary

As with any conversion optimization tips, make sure to thoroughly test these changes before committing them to 100 percent of your visitors. Luckily, the holiday season tends to send a lot of traffic, making significance levels quicker and easier to reach. Don’t stop testing!

Are you ready for the holiday rush? What’re you doing to move the needle this holiday season?

]]>http://www.ppc-advice.com/2012/11/15/top-conversion-optimization-tips-to-deploy-before-the-holiday-rush/feed/0882http://www.ppc-advice.com/2012/11/15/top-conversion-optimization-tips-to-deploy-before-the-holiday-rush/Top 20 Conversion Optimization Tipshttp://feedproxy.google.com/~r/Ppc-advicecom/~3/BdUHZK21brg/
http://www.ppc-advice.com/2012/06/30/top-20-conversion-optimization-tips/#respondSat, 30 Jun 2012 23:30:12 +0000http://www.ppc-advice.com/?p=879Conversion rate optimization is one of the most effective ways to grow profits for a web business, whether it’s an SMB or an enterprise-level site. But where do you start? What should you test? And what pitfalls should you watch out for? Here are 20 conversion optimization tips on how to get started. 1. Use the … Continue reading Top 20 Conversion Optimization Tips

2. Optimize Acquisition Channels First

This is particularly useful if you need to realize a quick win to show the value of conversion optimization because it is easy to show a reduction in overall cost per acquisition. Start with paid search and display advertising landing pages first, delve deeper with top referred pages but be careful with organic search entry pages due to varying traffic volume and search engine algorithm changes.

3. Scrutinize Lift Versus Shift

Optimization efforts usually count success in lift, but never consider the possibility of shift. Lift can be defined as an incremental and sustained increase in positive business growth. Optimizations with true lift do not disrupt existing conversion events. If your optimization creates localized lift and destabilizes conversion events on other areas of your site, you’re really seeing a shift.

4. Feel the Pain

Put yourself in the shoes of your customer and brainstorm their goals on your site. How easily could you perform the same tasks you’re asking your customers to complete? Do you set realistic expectations on how quickly someone can complete these tasks?

5. Analyze the Competition

Think you’re smarter than your competition? Try testing their ideas with your audience to find out what they might be doing better. Remember that regardless of how similar you site, product offerings, or services might be, no two sites will perform exactly the same.

6. Engage Test Groups

Try user research groups to test your website. There are free tools online such as fivesectiontest.com and usabilla.com as well as paid online focus groups such as usertesting.com and even session replay software such as Clicktale and Tealeaf. Sometimes user testing is the easiest way to get in your visitors’ head and find prospective customer pain points.

7. Recommend Products and Services

Industry giants like Apple, Dell, Amazon, and GoDaddy leverage the art of the upsell and leverage analytics to increase conversion volume and value per conversion.

8. Improve Self-Help

Areas on a website dedicated to helping people are most often frequented by loyal customers that prefer to solve their own problems. Help them save you money and phone calls and consider testing your self-help content by offering video tutorials, FAQs, comprehensive download archives, public service messaging and ensure you’re responding to social media channels.

9. Obsess Over Search Like Google Engineers

Search functionality on your website is often a last-ditch attempt that prospects and clients use to find what they want. It’s also probably the last capability you’ll ever consider to optimize. Start optimizing for search queries with no results and continue to optimize by matching synonyms and common misspelling with more relevant content.

10. Be Careful With Promotions

Incentives and urgency can have a strong effect on conversion rate but undesirable effect on lifetime value, use with caution. Online-savvy prospects are pre-conditioned to give a little to get a lot and are less likely to repeat purchase without further, unprofitable promotion.

11. Live Up to The Hype

Testimonials and professional affiliations can do wonders for conversion and consumer trust, if you can deliver. Get written approval for logo usage and recommendations and you’ve done your due diligence to avoid legal issues.

12. Be Trustworthy

Establishing trust for smaller brands can be challenging, especially online businesses. Ensure you’re doing your utmost to convey trust by including a no-nonsense privacy policy, clear contact us page, hours of operation, physical address and map locations, service level agreements (how long will it take to receive a call or email back?), trust marks and security certificates.

13. Content is King

Clear, concise content is still king, be cautious and exhaustively test reduction in content volume.

14. Integrate Web Analytics Capabilities

Optimization software can be very similar to web analytics but not exactly the same. In many cases, web analytics software knows more about user behavior, so leverage it!

15. Optimization Helps SEO

In a post-Panda world, Google revealed websites with better user experience (those that are optimized) perform better in the SERPs. Optimizations go hand-in-hand with SEO.

16. Leverage CRM Data

Optimizations take on new meaning (and better conversion) when you can target individuals based on CRM data. Consider augmenting optimizations based on aggregate customer groups such as lifetime value, customer tenure and likelihood to recommend.

17. Apply Monetary Value to Optimizations

Percentages are misleading. Lift and confidence is confusing. Equating an optimization to dollar value is crucial for scale because it can provide additional time for analysis and test execution, more money for better tools and additional human resources.

18. Make Optimization a Routine

Optimization isn’t a flavor of the month; it takes work and persistence to achieve long-term success. Plan ahead based on business goals and schedule optimizations based on priority and opportunity (or good timing). Planning also enables other stakeholders and team members to secure their own resources to make it happen.

19. Build a Culture of Optimization

Embed optimization into product, design or client lifecycles. Building a culture of optimization gives everyone a voice and means you’re never short of ideas for testing. Ensure that optimization software is integrated into all of your sites and platforms early in development so that you aren’t limited by technology penetration or lack thereof.

20. Take Everyone Along for the Ride

Unified organizational success is only truly realized when online and offline complement each other. Share findings from optimizations with front-line personnel and promote internal engagement to leverage offline experience in future optimizations. Conversion optimization should provide enough improvement to attribute value to all channels or organizational silos.

Have a favorite tip from above or seen it work in practice? Share it with us below.

]]>http://www.ppc-advice.com/2012/06/30/top-20-conversion-optimization-tips/feed/0879http://www.ppc-advice.com/2012/06/30/top-20-conversion-optimization-tips/Top 5 Dead Giveaways of SEO Con Artists & How to Protect Yourselfhttp://feedproxy.google.com/~r/Ppc-advicecom/~3/TNnssecGs0M/
http://www.ppc-advice.com/2012/05/03/top-5-dead-giveaways-of-seo-con-artists-how-to-protect-yourself/#respondThu, 03 May 2012 12:22:50 +0000http://www.ppc-advice.com/?p=871Those of us in the search community who have been around for a while can probably attest to this scenario: we’re at a trade show, speaking at a conference, or even having a drink at a bar and someone comes up to us to ask, “I’m paying $500 per month with an SEO company and I’m not … Continue reading Top 5 Dead Giveaways of SEO Con Artists & How to Protect Yourself

]]>Those of us in the search community who have been around for a while can probably attest to this scenario: we’re at a trade show, speaking at a conference, or even having a drink at a bar and someone comes up to us to ask, “I’m paying $500 per month with an SEO company and I’m not happy with the results, can you have a look and let me know what you’d do differently?”

Unfortunately, assumptions, strategies and tactics change so rapidly in our industry that it’s hard for most small business owners to keep up, let alone try to research all the current news and advice that floods the blogosphere.

Accountability is something that is near and dear to most of the writers here on Search Engine Watch because we realize that as an industry, it’s our duty to not only address all of the current search marketing and SEO issues for do-it-yourselfers, but also provide the know-how SMBs need to manage contract workers and agencies.

Whether you’re considering hiring an SEO, or have already hired one, here are the top five giveaways that can help you identify SEO con artists and some tips on how to protect yourself.

1. The “Bait and Switch”

This is a classic SEO con-artist tactic whereby traffic is purchased from paid online marketing services as reputable as Google AdWords. Savvy coders might even rewrite the traffic coming from AdWords to make it appear as legitimate organic visitors in logs and web analytics reporting.

Expert advice: Use a combination of web analytics reporting and web logs to try and determine where the true referrer of traffic is coming from. Install Google Webmaster Tools or Bing Webmaster Tools (better yet, both!) on your site for a true search engine view of organic traffic and rankings.

2. Hijacking Affiliate Codes

Much like the bait and switch, an SEO con artist may also opt to rewrite affiliate tracking codes for SMB websites that have active affiliate programs. This will make their “efforts” look good, and affiliate traffic look much worse.

Expert advice: Affiliates that send traffic to your site that converts relatively well won’t vary much from month to month. Ensure you communicate with your top-converting affiliates on a routine basis, in some cases they will notice something awry sooner than you do. If you’re on a first-name basis with them, they’ll tell you; otherwise they’ll just start referring traffic to the competition.

3. Social Media Smoke & Mirrors

Social media is a hot topic lately with the emergence of Google+ and the increasing persistence of personalized search results tied to your circles. Many SEO con artists will often push the need to set up a presence on Facebook, Twitter, and/or a personalized blog as the answer to your SEO woes. Creating a blog and making it appear legitimate can be executed rather cheaply, but that cheap content can also sink your rankings (and traffic) to the deepest depths of the search engines.

Expert advice: Unfortunately, without persistent updating and the social aspect of building a real community of followers – something only you can really do – most of these efforts fall flat.

4. Bare Minimum Meta Tags

There are still those companies that ask large sums of money to update meta tags on a website and that’s all they do. Updating meta tags is probably the easiest and most ineffective task any SEO can do, it really is the bare minimum.

Expert advice: Ask for an SEO audit of your site that includes a comprehensive list of recommendations with time and material estimates for each. This audit should list out all the changes the SEO intends to make on your site and their reasoning for making them. At the end of the day, you should feel comfortable what was promised was actually delivered based on the “before” audit of your site and even examples of source code.

5. Here One Minute, Houdini the Next

The classic con artist doesn’t stay very long in one place, so it isn’t uncommon that SEO companies disappear after 2 months into a year-long contract.

Expert advice: Go after reputable firms in the industry by asking for references. Engaging an SEO shouldn’t be any different than researching a contractor for improvements to your home. Pursue the same due diligence. Look for experts in all the right places, such as conferences, trade shows, sponsored webinars, and on industry organization websites such as SEMPO.

Have a horror story you’d like to share for my next column? Have any questions on how to detect a con artist? Leave me a comment below!